Romanian Jews lived under Antonescu, who did not join the war but was part of the fascist axis. The pogrom in the city of Iași in northern Romania began one week after Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of the USSR) and was the opening shot that ushered in mass murder of Jews. Eighty years ago, on June 28, 1941, about 15,000 Jews were taken to the main courtyard in the city and massacred. The men remained there while the women were sent back to their homes. The Romanian police started firing... just like that, for no reason, they sprayed the crowd with bullets.
The survivors were then put on cargo trains and driven back and forth for several days until silence was heard. The many bodies were dumped in the nearby town of Podu Iloaiei. Those who still survived were transferred to forced labor camps.... and again, the Germans did not fire a single shot. The Romanians carried out all the killing work for them.
I'm sorry, Grandma! This week I sat down for the first time to listen to your brother, how he managed to be saved and transferred to labor camps when he was only 15 years old.
To hear about your older brother Ephraim-Friedrich who was already a doctor in the Jewish community in Iași at the time of the pogrom, and how he was murdered.
Eighty years after the horror, I stand as a proud Jew on Romanian soil in an official memorial service in honor of the victims of the pogrom, this time as a board member of the World Zionist Organization. The voices of my brother's blood are crying out from the ground, and in the face of these voices, I am now sounding the alarm of antisemitism in Jewish communities all over the world.
The rising antisemitism around the world today does not miss any continent. Even in places that used to be a stable and secure fortress of pluralism and liberalism, today, there are voices of racism, hatred, prejudice, and many acts of violence against Jews and against the right of the State of Israel to exist.
In Israel, we are used to treating antisemitism as a historical problem that was solved when the State of Israel was established, and that things do not affect us. But this is not the case - as the corona has proven, we are all intertwined, and what happens to Jews on one side of the world can affect us all.
The calls for peace, fraternity, and reconciliation by the mayor of Iași (Romania), ambassadors from Europe as well as other elements who gathered to mark the 80th anniversary of the pogrom events shed a small ray of light as to the place of antisemitism in Europe—yet we are still required to shout—no more!
To my grandmother and so many other of our grandmothers and grandfathers—I am sorry for not listening.
The writer is head of the department of combatting antisemitism & enhancing resilience at the World Zionist Organization.